


Small Choices

by dragonshost



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:54:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25805452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonshost/pseuds/dragonshost
Summary: Lucy has made many choices after gaining her freedom from her father.  Now she finds herself making another.
Relationships: Rogue Cheney/Lucy Heartfilia
Comments: 1
Kudos: 37





	Small Choices

Choice was not something Lucy had been afforded growing up. Her every day had been controlled by a schedule of her father’s choosing, and with the expectation that even if she were to follow his every rule, even as an adult she would still not be free of his choices for her. Especially in the marriage department.

Disobeying him by continuing her study of celestial spirit magic, and summoning Aquarius whenever loneliness threatened to drown her, hadn’t really felt like a choice - more like the manifestation of her instincts for self-preservation. But that choice, small though it was, had led her to other, bigger rebellions.

The first choice she ever truly felt she made for herself and only herself... was when she ran away from home. The world opened up before her, impossibly large and impossibly daunting, but full of choices. Her choices.

That world of infinite choices narrowed somewhat in joining Fairy Tail. Her team was pretty good at dragging her into their shenanigans, but never did Lucy feel as trapped and powerless as she had with her father. It was freeing in a way that the open world hadn’t been - having at least a little structure was familiar, and calming. It helped her from losing herself under open, endless skies. It gave her what she had truly wanted all along - a place to belong.

Lucy wasn’t free from the consequences of her choices, of course. When her father sent Phantom Lord to collect her, that was more than apparent. But she wouldn’t go willingly, and she didn’t. She would show her father in turn that his own choices had consequences.

She never truly felt cornered like that again... until Tenrou Island. With death bearing down on her and her friends, there was nowhere left to run. Her options had run out. But she wouldn’t have chosen differently, had she the chance. She wouldn’t regret taking Cana’s hand. She refused to regret it.

By the grace of her friends, she’d made it out of there by the skin of her teeth. Displaced into a world unfamiliar and terrifying and far too big once more.

Before she’d even had the time to recover from that, she was thrown into the Grand Magic Games. She wasn’t sure if she resented her team being chosen - especially when she failed in her fight against Flare so badly.

And then once more death bore down on her friends, her makeshift family that she’d chosen for herself. It came for the future version of herself, her counterpart’s blood staining the tiles in her place. And the man behind it all laughed as he watched the Eclipse Gate open, everyone turned into his puppets, stripped from choice, manipulated into following his will.

Now here he was. Laughing with his guild friends. Not the same person as the one that had attacked so brutally, but a once and future enemy all the same. But not that one version. Not yet. Maybe never, now that he’d seen firsthand the consequences his choice could wreak on the people he cared about.

That’s what it all boiled down to, didn’t it? Choices. His. Lucy’s.

“...You always have a choice,” she told herself. Yes. Small though they may be, choices littered her past and her present - branching off into infinite futures, each filled with their own choices leading to yet more paths and futures.

So Lucy made another choice.

And walked over to introduce herself to Rogue Cheney.


End file.
